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5 Scheduling Benefits Your Employees Will Love

Among the many alternative benefits you can offer your employees, those which relate to scheduling are among the least costly to your company. At the same time, scheduling benefits are often highly valued by employees. Moreover, you don’t have to make disruptive scheduling changes in order to create an employee benefit. Consider the following five ideas and see if one of them can increase the feel-good factor amongst your workforce.

1: Easy Online Self-Scheduling Apps

The thought of allowing your employees to create their own schedules might conjure up chaotic images, but really, employee self-scheduling doesn’t have to be difficult or disorganized. By requiring that your workers schedule their hours at least two weeks in advance, you have plenty of time to look over the final self-selections and discuss adjustments with individuals if necessary.

In fact, rather than using a wall chart or spreadsheet to administer an employee self-scheduling program, you will find there are now some great scheduling apps available, which make the task easier for employees and employer alike. Employees love the convenience, freedom, and flexibility afforded them when they can set or edit their own schedules in an app. For the employer, these tools make it easier to identify any scheduling conflicts that arise and address them with the staff.

2: The Spontaneous Recess

Although this is more a case of anti-scheduling than actual scheduling, calling a spontaneous 15 to 30-minute recess every few days can be a great way to make employees feel good. Just like back in school, you can ring a bell or use some other auditory cue to call an immediate recess at a random time.

When the bell rings, everybody gets to finish up a phone call or other task that can’t be “saved” and go outside the office for a predetermined period of time. During this time they can do as they wish; run a quick domestic errand for example or just go outside and get some fresh air.

3: Mental Recharge Breaks

Mental recharge breaks are a variation on the spontaneous recess. However instead of a recess for everyone, mental recharge breaks are taken by individuals, at any time they need to take one. During the break, an employee can just take a short walk, do some workout exercises, meditate or do anything that takes their mind off the job for a few minutes.

4: Early-Finish Fridays – Late Start Mondays

This is a great scheduling trick which lets employees extend their weekends a little. Why not let some of your employees go home two or three hours early on a Friday and the remainder start work late on a Monday? To keep things fair, you can switch the groups of employees every month, so everyone gets to benefit from early starts to the weekend and lie-ins on a Monday.

5: Weekly Work-at-Home Day

If yours is a company where remote working is practical and can get the job done, take advantage of technology and let your employees work from home one day per week. You can either let all your employees work at home on the same day or stagger things, so you always have some employees in the office.

If none of these five employee scheduling benefits sound right for your business, there are a few more great ideas in this article from Mashable. Alternatively you can probably come up with some original ways of your own to stir up your employees’ schedule and put some variety into their working week.